Ashes in the Snow (2018)
★★½ — Ashes in the Snow (2018)
I went into Ashes in the Snow expecting a story. What I got was a punch to the gut and a history lesson I didn't know I was missing.
This is my Lithuanian stop on the A-Z World Movie Tour, and Lithuania did not ease me in gently. Set during Stalin's brutal deportation of Lithuanians to Siberia and the Altai region, the film follows sixteen-year-old Lina and her family as they're ripped from their home, thrown onto cattle trains, and sent to a labour camp where survival is a daily miracle. No melodrama, no over-the-top speeches. Just ordinary people enduring the unimaginable, and the camera watching them do it without flinching.
The cold here isn't just weather. It's a character in its own right. A relentless, bone-deep force that strips away warmth and hope and, eventually, life itself. You feel every rationed spoonful of soup, every frostbitten toe, every whispered prayer. There's a stark, almost cruel beauty to the Siberian landscape on screen, the kind of place where even the sun looks like it regrets showing up. The cinematography captures both sides of that coin brilliantly, the suffocating bleakness and the terrible openness of it all.
What keeps the film from becoming pure misery is defiance. Lina sketches her world in secret, documenting the atrocities around her with charcoal and stolen scraps of paper. Her art is an act of rebellion, a way of saying: we were here, we mattered, you will not erase us. It's quietly devastating, and it gives the film a thread of humanity to hold onto when everything else is being taken away.
The performances are grounded and restrained throughout. Nobody is playing suffering for the back row. These feel like real people making impossible choices in impossible circumstances, and that restraint is what makes it land so hard. I've seen films about Soviet-era repression before, but something about the specificity here, the Lithuanian names, the Baltic context, the particular texture of this community being dismantled, made it feel fresh and urgent in a way I wasn't prepared for.
And that's what I keep coming back to. Over 130,000 Lithuanians were deported. Seventy percent of them were women and children. Many never came home. This wasn't war. It wasn't justice. It was state-sponsored erasure, a deliberate attempt to hollow out a people's identity and replace it with silence. So how many of us actually knew that before a film told us? That's the real crime, not just the camps themselves but the decades of quiet that followed them.
It reminded me, in a roundabout way, of my reaction to Tevanik (2014), another film from the A-Z tour that hit me with a history I'd been allowed to ignore for too long. There's something uncomfortable about realising cinema is doing the job that education should have done years ago. But here we are.
Ashes in the Snow is not an easy watch. It's not supposed to be. But it's a necessary one, made with care and a real sense of purpose. Four stars, and I mean every one of them.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2018 | Watched: 2025-07-12
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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More from Lithuania: Tevanik (2014)
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